Subject or Object? SINo-American competition and European sTRAtegic autonomy

ongoing

The intensifying great power competition between the United States and China has arguably become the structuring vector in international politics. This project examines to what extent the European Union (EU) is able to autonomously make decisions regarding its relations with the United States and China. The key innovation is to present a comprehensive theory to explain to what extent and under what circumstances external or internal actors have the upper hand in informing European policy choices in Sino-American competition. Assuming the existence of a correlation between the EU’s (degree of) unity and autonomy, the latter is depicted as a relative and contingent concept. The main hypothesis is that the EU’s degree of autonomy vis-à-vis China and the United States will be high in those policy areas where it enjoys exclusive competences, moderate where it has shared competences, and low where the competences rest with the member states. I expect this to happen despite the high degree of “issue linkage” (Haas, 1980; McGinnis, 1986) between the different areas of EU external policy; despite the fact that the United States and China will try to exploit Europe’s dependence in some areas to extract concessions in others; and despite the fact that the EU itself will try to build on its competences in some areas (e.g. trade) to expand its clout in others (e.g. foreign and security policy). SINATRA pushes back against the conventional wisdom that the EU is either poised to become an autonomous subject or condemned to the status of mere object or battleground in Sino-American competition, by arguing that the EU will be subject and object at the same time, and unpacking the mechanics of that tension. The project draws on mixed methods research, combining quantitative analysis of European, American and Chinese voting patterns and public discourse (i.e. through the use of content analysis software and manual coding) in a variety of international organisations and debates